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Working Paper
Does stock market wealth matter for consumption?
This paper explores the household behavior that underlies the link between wealth and consumption at the aggregate level. One possibility is that changes in wealth directly cause changes in consumption through their effect on households' contemporaneous budget sets; another possibility is that they merely predict changes in consumption because they signal changes in future income. Based on analysis of household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that direct wealth effects begin to show up relatively quickly and continue to boost consumption growth for a number of ...
Working Paper
How prudent are consumers?
Working Paper
Do provisional estimates of output miss economic turning points?
Initial estimates of aggregate output and its components are based on very incomplete source data, so they may not fully capture shifts in economic conditions. In particular, if those estimates are based partly on trends in preceding quarters, provisional estimates may overstate activity when actual output is decelerating and understate it when actual output is accelerating. We examine this issue using the Real Time Data Set for Macroeconomists, which contains contemporaneous estimates of GNP or GDP and its components beginning in the late 1960s, as well as financial-market information and ...
Journal Article
Survey of finance companies, 2000
Against a backdrop of robust economic activity, the finance company sector expanded briskly over the second half of the 1990s. The value of receivables held by finance companies in the United States rose nearly 50 percent, or about 11 percent a year, between 1996 and 2000. Business lending remained finance companies' major line of activity; the importance to the sector of consumer lending and leasing declined slightly, and the importance of real estate lending rose a bit. These and other findings from the Federal Reserve's mid-2000 benchmark survey of finance companies, as well as ...
Newsletter
Helping Homeowners During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons from the Great Recession
The Covid-19 public health crisis has sharply reduced the earnings of millions of U.S. households, following the severe curtailment of economic activity needed to contain the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, households continue to confront their ongoing financial obligations. The ability of households to manage these obligations has important consequences for the speed at which the U.S. economy can recover from the current crisis. Households that are wiped out financially in the coming months will not be in a position to strongly resume spending once the virus containment issues have passed. ...
Conference Paper
Financial innovation and the Great Moderation: what do household data say?
Aggressive deregulation of the household debt market in the early 1980s triggered innovations that greatly reduced the required home equity of U.S. households, allowing them to cash-out a large part of accumulated equity. In 1982, home equity equaled 71 percent of GDP; so this generated a borrowing shock of huge macroeconomic proportions. The combination of increasing household debt from 43 to 56 percent of GDP with high interest rates during the 1982-1990 period is consistent with such a shock to households? demand for funds. This paper uses a quantitative general equilibrium model of ...
Journal Article
Mortgage refinancing in 2001 and early 2002
Over the past ten years, millions of homeowners have taken advantage of lower mortgage interest rates and higher home values and have refinanced their mortgage loans. For many, the decision to refinance was motivated by a desire to reduce their monthly mortgage payments, either by obtaining a lower interest rate or by extending the maturity of their mortgage. When they have refinanced, many homeowners have liquefied some of the equity they accumulated in their homes by borrowing more than they needed to pay off their former mortgage and cover the transaction costs of the refinancing. They ...
Discussion Paper
Wealth shocks and macroeconomic dynamics
The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of longstanding interest to economists. Analysts believe that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity. This paper considers so-called wealth effects?the impact of changes in wealth on household consumption and the overall macroeconomy. There is an extensive existing literature on wealth effects, but there are also many unanswered issues and questions. This paper reviews the important issues regarding the role wealth plays in the macroeconomy and argues that there is a need for much more wealth effect ...
Working Paper
Measuring household wealth in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics: the role of retirement assets
While the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has much to offer researchers studying household behavior, one limitation is that its summary measure of wealth is not as broad as those of other commonly used surveys, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), because it does not include the value of defined-contribution (DC) pensions. This paper describes the pension data available in the PSID and shows how they can be used to create a more comprehensive picture of household finances. We then compare various measures derived from these data with their counterparts from the SCF. Along a ...